'The Weir' review — a remarkable Brendan Gleeson leads a pitch-perfect revival of Conor McPherson's play

Read our review of The Weir, also directed by Conor McPherson, now in performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 6 December.

Summary

• Brendan Gleeson returns to the West End stage to star in Conor McPherson's 1997 play
• 'The Weir' features five people sharing both ghostly and personal stories in an Irish pub
• This magnificently performed production is deeply affecting

It’s a criticism often levelled at playwrights who direct their own plays that they’re too close to the work to see the steers it needs to be a success on stage. Fortunately, this could not be further from the truth for Conor McPherson’s own production of his 1997 work The Weir, which is quietly magnificent; it’s the play exactly as it was meant to be staged.

The casting helps, of course. Brendan Gleeson leads a pitch-perfect, five-strong ensemble in delivering this naturalistic play which invites the audience in on an evening at a cosy pub (designed by Rae Smith) in rural Ireland. There a trio of local bachelors of varying ages are self-consciously entertaining a beautiful “blow in” from Dublin with ghost stories.

Gleeson’s Jack is a tricky part to land: he’s a character who must sardonically laugh along with his fellow drinkers' playful jibes that he’s ugly and cantankerous, while somehow showing us he’s the most decent of the bunch. In Gleeson’s performance, Jack exudes remarkable poise and dignity as a man soldiering on in the face of a life lived with some regrets.

He’s not the only one making the best of it. Around him, Owen McDonnell’s barman Brendan is another character subverting the bachelor trope. Warm, generous and good-humoured, there’s an unspoken sense he could well make a good partner for Kate Phillips’s sophisticated mucker-inner Valerie, were she not to move back to Dublin and patch things up with her husband following their awful shared trauma. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s stoic Finbar might knock back the whisky, but he’s wholeheartedly dedicated to caring for his mother, and quick to step up when Jack requests a favour.

The gleeful irony is that Sean McGinley’s married Jim, a man who left the countryside to make his fortune, is the only morally dubious character among them, showing the attractive Valarie around the area with questionable motives. McGinley captures his tricksiness, playing him as an irritatingly slick showman. Together, this smorgasbord of personalities are vividly real and increasingly entertaining.

It takes a few minutes to acclimatise, as McPherson drops us in the middle of a conversation where local names are banded about and the banter flows as quickly the booze in what is clearly a familiar routine for the men. Women are such a rare sighting in the pub that there’s no loo for them, and when Valerie arrives and orders a wine, and Brendan eventually finds a bottle, he refuses to allow his uncertainty to dampen his hospitality and pours her half a pint of it.

As the conversation turns to tales of fairies, folklore, spirits and strange graveyard sightings, their stories have us rapt. But it’s accounts of personal loss, kicked off by Valerie but later continued by Jack, that are the clincher. Gleeson’s Jack contains traces of Beckett’s Krapp recalling a lost love — it’s one of the most affecting performances I’ve seen.

We already know The Weir is a masterpiece, of course. After several extensions to its inaugural run for the Royal Court’s smaller space (temporarily housed at the Ambassadors Theatre at the time), it transferred to the West End and ran for two years. But this production, almost 30 years on, is quite perfect. And if its three-month run doesn’t extend, it’ll surely be because the stage can’t hold Gleeson hostage from the screen for any longer.

The Weir is at the Harold Pinter Theatre to 6 December. Book The Weir tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: The Weir (Photos by Rich Gilligan)